


Humanumission

by actonbell



Category: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Genre: Androids, Ansible, Artificial Intelligence, Friendship, Gen, Holiday Fic Exchange, Unreliable Narrator, Yuletide, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-19 11:59:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13123293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actonbell/pseuds/actonbell
Summary: Murderbot and Dr Mensah meet again.





	Humanumission

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muccamukk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/gifts).



Dozens of cycles of traveling on cargo transports had given me a new wealth of knowledge about their bots, and I didn't want any of it. They were all a lot smarter than humans thought they were, they were obsessed with the tiniest details of ship design and could talk about it for entire days, and almost none of them liked _Sanctuary Moon._ I was so bored and fed up with them that I figured trying to pass as an augmented human, even for maybe just an hour while I tried to figure out some better class of ship to hitchhike rides on, couldn't be that terrible. I wasn't passing any better as a free bot even with some cargo bots, which was irritating. _How hard can it be?_ I thought. I had forgotten.

For one thing, free bots and augmented humans and regular humans and in general people that didn't have governor modules implanted in their heads had all these little different tics and mannerisms. They bit their fingernails or stretched out their arms or looked up for no reason or blankly looked around and then smiled when one of them made eye contact with another one. And the eye contact couldn't be too brief or too extended, or they felt something was wrong, and the smile had to last long enough to convince one of them that the other wasn't going to fly at them and try ripping out their throat, but if it lasted too long they got nervous. Murderbots don't move unless we need to. No twitching. I suppose if I had concentrated I could have tried to make an algorithm for a smile lasting no longer than _y_ milliseconds but no shorter than _x_ milliseconds, but I didn't care and it probably wouldn't have worked anyway. 

But the worst thing, the _very_ worst thing, I was remembering with dismay as I tried to mingle with old humans and young humans and humans in between hauling along baby humans, and station police and transit ring workers and bots of every make and year and drones that occasionally swooped down to our level to check out suspicious packages or unattended cargo, was the small talk.

Nobody wanted to actually communicate information, which should have made it easier. Humans don't really need honest responses to "How are you?" or "What are you doing?" which was good because the only answers I had that didn't sound off would get me confiscated and wiped. But like with the infinite little movements they were always making, one stock answer wouldn't have been right either. If you were just saying something by route, they knew it, and then they _noticed_ you. I hated humans noticing me anyway because that meant they were looking at me, but humans noticing me as being maybe something other than human while we were both in the human part of the transit ring would, again, lead to the whole confiscation and wiping routine, which I really wanted to avoid. It was so unfair I had had to leave behind my armour, which made me anonymous and also terrifying enough that not even the chattiest human would try to ask me if my day was going well. 

Unfortunately the armour also made it immediately obvious that I was a murderbot. Most humans don't think of murderbots as having faces, or think that we all have the same face. We're either scary suits of armour walking around (usually not anywhere anyone can see), or like clones in the popular shows. It's true that there's a standard facial model, with some variations in features or skin colour or even the underlying inorganic foundations depending on the job. But for us all to have the _same_ face was too unnerving, and made humans nervous, and they started to want to use murderbots less often and the company started losing money. It's the same reason we have expressions, and the equivalent of facial muscles and tendons underneath the mask part of the suit skin. 

And expressions, even the limited ones most murderbots have, shape and change faces. You can't take off the head unit and replace it, like you can with everything else; if the very outside gets too damaged you can just put a new mask on it, but even that can be different, if you know how to look. Most humans aren't in a position to, and not even most murderbots would, it's not like we're all constantly checking each other's faces for microexpressions and getting edgy if just a few aren't exactly quite right. Humans like variations. Random variations, or variations that are close enough to random you can't tell them apart without a computer analysis. Murderbots like routine. Humans appreciate that quality in murderbots too. Nobody wants a spontaneous killing machine.

And so, after just a few minutes of trying to pass as an augmented human on a transit ring that wasn't even that crowded, I would have been happy to listen to a cargo bot explain the reprogramming it needed to update its real-time inventory management system so that its automatic bulk unloading system would speed up. In detail. 

The other thing the humans all wanted to chat about was the news. They wanted to talk at length about how terrible some natural disaster was, or how wonderful the human response to the natural disaster was, or trade badly manipulated pictures of baby animals when they got tired of natural disasters. Murderbots don't watch human news. Combat SecUnits got sent to the places where humans were killing each other either to try to stop the killing on one side or help it along on the other, but even they didn't keep track of human conflicts or politics. Why should they? What was important was they pointed their weapons in the right direction, i.e. where humans told them to. Most of the news was all about various corporations anyway, and I didn't care what they did. Sometimes I checked the entertainment news feeds, to see what shows were getting cancelled or if an actor I hadn't seen in a while had died, but not that often. 

Which was how a male human wound up beaming his news feed right at me when I said that no, I hadn't heard about some particular thing happening. It's not even rude behaviour for a human, they just assume you're interested in whatever they're interested in. At that point I was standing in front of a display window for spacesuits which individuals and private companies could actually buy for recreational use rather than just the company renting them for jobs. This meant that the suits were high-quality and of course astronomically priced. I was idly wondering if I could try hacking a suit and how far it would be able to get me into deep space in perfect solitude, when a human next to me said "Damn, those players are getting wiped out today!" He turned to me and asked, "See the big game results yet?" I don't think he was trying to flirt with me because I have very short synthetic hair and a face deliberately designed to be unmemorable and was wearing a loose long-sleeved shirt and big jacket, baggy pants, and workboots, all in black or brown or grey. It was hard to tell, because I was staring at his chin. I think he was just so enthusiastic about the big game results that he wasn't satisfied knowing about them just by himself, he needed someone else to know about them too. Most humans are like that. They need to share, whether you want to or not.

So of course when I saw myself on the news feed he shoved in my face, it was also right when a human was closely looking at me for my reaction. It's still hard for me to control my facial expressions because up until a couple dozen cycles ago I could hide behind my nice opaque faceplate, but I don't tend to react unless something violently upsets me. Unfortunately one of the things that violently upsets me is humans scrutinizing my face. Fortunately he assumed I was just surprised and said he was sorry, and then I had to say I was all right, and he said he didn't mean to alarm me, and I said I was all right again, and then he got a call in his personal feed which distracted him and he stopped talking to me. Which was good, because I was starting to think of how easily (very) and unnoticeably (somewhat) I could kill him and escape detection (not easily quantified). He asked the other human calling him if they had seen the big game results and apparently they had, so I was free to check the public news feed myself and see why I was on it.

The news story wasn't really about me, of course (no murderbot would make the news unless it went berserk and killed humans, the way I had, only those stories tended to be censored instead of broadcast), but Dr Mensah. The picture of me was from when I had been the hotel lobby with Pin-Lee and Ratthi and the drone cams had been able to get up close to us, only the reporters had been interested in Pin-Lee, so the drones had focused on her, not me. Then there was stock footage of Dr Mensah with some other people I didn't know. The real story was how there was a big fight going on between the company and DeltFall and Preservation on one side, and GrayCris all by itself on the other. (Don't feel sorry for GrayCris, it could eat all those other ones for lunch.) Like I said, humans aren't used to seeing SecUnits out of armour, or they think we all have the same face, so none of the reporters had thought I was anything other than a typical augmented human, maybe a contracted bodyguard for Pin-Lee. The story the human had accidentally showed me wasn't about the fight, it was a feel-good short piece about how Dr Mensah had bought the SecUnit which had saved her and her crew and taken it back to Preservation where it could be a happy free agent off inventory, and Dr Mensah had been so touched by the SecUnit's self-sacrificial behaviour (that was what the news narrator said) that she had begun agitating for construct rights, including constructs not needing a "guardian" (owner) on non-corporate political entities like her world and a couple of others. That made the story bigger news again, instead of a touching piece the humans could tell each other about, but as far as I saw the focus was on Dr Mensah and the reporters thought I was off on Preservation on her farm, farming away.

Seeing myself in the news was very alarming, no matter how many times I reasoned that since I hadn't already been stopped and taken into custody, it was likely nobody had recognized me as the SecUnit in the story. Probably nobody would be able to tell me from any other SecUnit anyway, unless they had spent hours with me when I had the helmet off, but Dr Mensah and her crew were the only ones who had done that. I still felt as though I had "ESCAPED CONSTRUCT, SHOOT ON SIGHT" hanging above me in giant blinking red hololetters, visible to everyone in the transit ring and maybe out in the deep space surrounding us too. The real problem was I had voided the company's contract with Dr Mensah by running away, but the bond and security companies were always on the alert for "free agents" who were "off inventory" too, if they didn't stay on the non-corporate political entities with their guardians where they were safe. I hadn't seen any sign of bonds-and-sec here, which didn't mean much: they were good at hunting. Although I was out of inventory I hadn't gotten out of Corporation Rim, which didn't believe in the idea that SecUnits weren't automatically company property. So even if Dr Mensah and the other people on Preservation hadn't ratted me out, I could still be confiscated. But if the company knew that I had gone off by myself, after hacking my module, it might not matter how much it would cost them (and it would cost a lot) to destroy me. I was depending on nobody recognizing I was a SecUnit, _and_ nobody recognizing I was _that_ SecUnit. And the news feed was on a perpetual loop, with various stories being updated as soon as reporters got any new information. I had almost never had to worry about humans thinking I had a face to begin with, let alone whether or not they would recognize it, and the sensation was very disorienting, like when grav gets turned off in a workroom.

Obviously what I should have done was immediately head for the level of the transport ring where the cargo transports were and convince another bot to give me a ride as fast as possible without actually running. There was something else in the news story, though. The reporters had used a clip of Dr Mensah talking and cut the sound while they superimposed their audio over her, so humans couldn't hear what she was saying. Murderbots are good at lipreading. I could tell she was saying: _I want to thank everyone very much for all the messages I have received about this particular issue. I have read them all. If you would like to leave me a message, please call my general office number via ansible._

The news cycle started over again but I tuned it out. I stood there and thought. There was no reason for me to think the message was for _me,_ there weren't any hidden meanings or agreed-on code words or anything like that. I knew it was for me, anyway, without any rational basis for knowing that, and feeling that way was irritating and maybe alarming. Just because I had sent Dr Mensah a message didn't mean she had gotten it. And even if she'd gotten it, she might not have liked it. She might be angry with me. But she didn't _look_ angry. And, somehow, it felt like she was telling me to call her. Ansible was a smart choice -- it was cheap, everywhere, almost untraceable, and unpopular these days because it didn't have vid or 4-D or really-feelie capability. If there was a communications network less likely to be monitored I didn't know about it, and I knew about a lot of them. But if....I discovered I was chewing on my fingernail, which I didn't think was possible for a murderbot. (Ours don't come off, for one thing.) 

I turned and went in the opposite direction from the ramp down to the transportation pods, toward the bank of private call booths instead. It was right opposite a giant holo display of a red and orange flaming nebula. It was probably just my paranoia but it seemed like a gigantic eye watching me as I shut the door, turned my back, pulled the hood of my jacket so far down I could barely see, and made the ansible connection. Every call booth has one, although some of them get vandalized. This one was fine -- I checked it needlessly two or three times, just like a human would -- and made my call. Mensah's general office number had a recorded greeting -- the ansible is instantaneous transmission, and I realized I had no idea what time it was on Preservation, or wherever this office was. If she was even there. The greeting invited me to leave my own message and contact information, and instead of saying anything I pressed the option that gave my ansible's coordinates and broke the connection immediately. Then I just stood there, like I was a puppet again. I didn't twitch, I didn't bite my fingernail, I didn't even breathe fast. I waited for either Dr Mensah to call or for the transit ring guards to open the door, quiet as if I was in standby.

Some time later, I didn't know when (I mean, I could have checked my internal clock to make sure of the interval, but the point was I _didn't)_ my ansible's Incoming light lit up, bright in the dark little booth. I stared at it. I don't know how Dr Mensah figured out it was me so quickly, she must have been getting dozens and dozens of crank calls about her ideas that murderbots had personal rights. Public ansibles don't take messages, so the signal would keep being put through until whoever was on the other end of the line gave up. I accepted the call and Dr Mensah said "Hello?" first.

Her voice was so familiar, but not really how I'd remembered it, so it was strange too. I cleared my throat. "Hi. Hello. It's me," I said. " -- Murderbot." That wasn't something anyone else would know, and I heard her gasp on the other end of the connection, wherever she was. "It _is_ you!" she said. "Pin-Lee thought -- but where -- are you all right?" It was a real question, not a typical human one.

"I'm fine," I said. "I mean, I'm okay. Nobody's....I'm all right." The words didn't really mean anything, but since it was an ansible call at least nobody was wasting any money.

"It's not on the news cycle yet, but the vote on Preservation just went through. Constructs don't need guardians anymore here. It was close, and the corporations kept trying to delay it." It was very strange hearing her talk about something other than EvilSurvey trying to kill us, like seeing her dressed in her business clothes. "But now a construct is a citizen, at least on our world." Great, my confinement would just be to that entire planet. Maybe it had lots of mountains. Maybe I could take up solitary hiking. "I'm not there -- this is my personal ans, I'm at one of our embassies a few gates from your ans coordinates." The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I don't know if that had ever happened to me before, either. "If you came here, to the embassy, this is legally our territory, so when you left you'd be a citizen. Not in company space, but I could give you a travel chit, and that should work even with bonds-and-sec."

Like always, she had already thought of what might happen and had a plan for it. It was a good one -- travel chits were a pretty old idea, back from when most rings and ports weren't company-owned, and people who didn't work for the corporations had to pass through their turf. Chits had stayed popular because at one point a company had gotten the bright idea to charge non-employees double or triple or whatever the fees to use its transit ring, and the courts had ruled otherwise. So all the companies were still bound by travel chits, and if they didn't honour one or even detained someone who had one they'd be in big trouble with the courts, immediately. Every citizen had one, or at least was entitled to one, but they didn't use them very often. Even travel chits didn't mean much to bond and security companies, but if one was issued by an important political official from a non-corporate political entity, it might slow them down some. Not much else would.

"I can get you a ticket on a diplomatic shuttle," Dr Mensah went on, "and if you can pass as....then, you could get through the gates. It's a non-stop flight, cleared at the transit rings in advance. You'll have to present the travel chit to get here to the embassy, but we've paid for a temporary one in advance, I can transfer it to the ring where you are. I don't want you to go to the diplomatic office, though, I'll get a licensed and bonded courier to pick it up, and they can bring it to you -- are you by the call bank?"

I hadn't thought of what it might be like, to have that kind of foresight and planning ability directed right at you personally. I cleared my throat. "Yeah," I said.

"Good, I thought you might have used a pocket ansible on one of the lower levels." She meant on one of the non-human parts of the station, like cargo or maintenance or a company storage space where I would have been brought in a transport box, on my way to a contract. That would have been smart, since the call would really have been virtually untraceable, but even passing as an augmented human I might have gotten automatically picked up by a security sweep just for being down there without a good reason, like being security or cargo. "Can you stay there for....fifteen minutes?"

Murderbots don't cry, but my eyes felt hot and wet, very uncomfortably so. "Why are you doing this?" I asked her. "For _me?_ I ran out on you."

Dr Mensah didn't say anything for one minute thirty seconds exactly, which felt more like an hour, but when she spoke her voice sounded the same. "We were worried about you being....detained," she said, "and captured and interrogated and wiped and sold for scrap," she didn't say, "and wanted to help. And we would like it very much if you visited -- sometime -- and I would very much like to see you again."

Well, that was that. She went on some about a few other final details, and the thought of pretending to be an augmented human even long enough to get on a transport pod on my way to somewhere else was like a medical tool scraping along my bones, but I could see Dr Mensah again, and she wasn't mad, so I said yes. I don't know if I could ever really have said no to her, not when it mattered, anyway. I could hear the smile in her voice when I agreed. I also liked the idea of travelling relatively safely, or at least not having to worry about being grabbed at random by security or turned in by a nosy human, and at the very least it meant no more fucking cargo transport bots. 

After we hung up I opened the booth door and leaned on its little narrow bench that never has enough room for both buttcheeks at once -- it's so universal it must be part of the design -- and waited. The courier arrived in ten minutes flat, glanced down at a handheld unit and strolled over to me. "You, ah, Murderbot?"

"That's me," I said. I wondered briefly if that could be my name as a person, but Dr Mensah probably wouldn't like it. He took a regular sealed minipouch out of his pocket and handed it to me. I opened it and saw a bigger handheld unit. It flickered on and started showing me files in sequence: one was a list of instructions, another was a copy of my authorization to board the diplomatic shuttle, there was the scanned copy of the certified temporary travel chit, other official papers like that. I checked through all the files, then checked them again, which was turning into a bad human habit of mine. I hoped I wouldn't develop very many. The courier had to wait by law until I verified everything had been delivered, so he said impatiently, "All there?"

"Oh. Yeah." He'd been paid and tipped in advance, so he should have left, but instead he asked "Any return message?"

"What? Uh....uh, thanks. I guess. I mean, that's the message. And thanks. To you too." I was sounding stupider and more able to pass as human by the minute.

"Thank _you,"_ he said loudly, "that was goddamn easy money. Biggest motherfucking tip I ever got." That was risky, since service workers remember big tippers, but on the other hand if Dr Mensah's plan of emancipating a rogue murderbot that had already killed dozens of humans and then escaped her custody somehow worked, a courier remembering his biggest tip would be the last thing she needed to worry about. He made a silly snappy salute and walked off, and I mentally called up the map I'd memorized of the transit ring and started up to the diplomatic level, which was off limits to not only regular non-diplomat citizens but station and ring security too; even corporate reps had to sign legal waivers before they were let in. I was probably the first murderbot to get up there, although that was less of an accomplishment than it sounds since by definition I was the first murderbot to do much of anything other than murdering.

 

Travelling when you're not in a transport box or hitchhiking or trying to smuggle yourself as cargo isn't bad, especially when you have fantastic paperwork. I'd memorized my instructions and deleted the file, which makes it sound more glamorous than it was because all I had to do from the front diplomatic entrance on was wave my travel chit in the face of whoever popped up in front of me. There was a _fleet_ of diplomatic shuttles, in case someone very important had to get to this or that embassy for their very important business right away, and one would be leaving in just a few minutes that could take me to the station where the Preservation embassy was (it was called Port LibertyTrades; I made a note of that, since humans care where they're going even if murderbots don't). Here was a place to wait (comfortable big single chair with a full view out one-way plastiview of the transit ring below), they would escort me personally to the departure gate when the shuttle was ready to go, and did I want anything to drink? Coffee, water, tea, spirits, juice? Murderbots are designed to be able to ingest simple things like water and protein gel because otherwise we can run down too fast without access to a cubicle, but alcohol and caffeine make us sick. I finally said yes to some kind of fancy flavoured fizzy water with a wedge of fruit jammed onto the glass because saying no to everything seemed too memorable, and I didn't want the service worker to keep fussing trying to find _something_ I wanted to drink. Next to even the service worker's uniform I was dressed like a vagrant, but as long as I didn't have to make small talk or look at pictures of baby animals I thought I could pass. If I had been able to relax, the chair and the view and the drink would all have been nice, but I was waiting for security to break in and take me back to the company.

Then I was on another very comfortable single seat on the shuttle and someone else was quizzing me about having something to drink, and I chose more fancy water, and then I shut my eyes most of the way and lowered my heart rate and temperature so the humans would think I was asleep. Not very adventurous, but it was the safest way to avoid small talk and questions. The shuttle didn't have to check in at transit rings or wait to be cleared at the wormhole gates, so the whole trip only took about twenty cycles. I spent most of it faking sleep and wishing I could put myself in real standby, but I didn't dare. I kept my hood pulled down low and after a couple of hours watched _Sanctuary Moon._ That wasn't even that unusual, some other people on the shuttle were watching entertainment or news feeds. It was just that none of them had hundreds of hours of their shows in internal storage, and I did. I felt I had the advantage there.

Dr Mensah was waiting for me right at the gate on PortLiberatedCash or whatever it was called, and it was a good thing I don't tend to show feelings, or have feelings, a whole lot. Dr Mensah was probably good for a human at not showing a lot of her feelings when she wanted to, but I could still tell she was happy to see me, for some reason. I didn't have any baggage (which would have been a mistake otherwise, but on the diplo shuttle nobody seemed to care) so she immediately took me to the transport pod which was on a one-way non-stop route to her embassy. There were different pod tubes leading off the station to different embassies, each one decorated with the representative colours that political entity had chosen, and I saw the embassies themselves were all in a ring around this one port, which seemed like a terrible design, but what does a murderbot know? Dr Mensah didn't do anything stupid like touch my back or take hold of my arm but she was setting the pace and going at a pretty good clip, for a human. Then we were out of the tube, and on the walkway in front of her embassy, and inside. I had the feeling the doors had locked behind us, or maybe that was just because that was what I would have done.

Dr. Mensah said, "Welcome to _my_ world," and I could tell she thought it was amusing-- it's a human thing. I tried to smile back and it felt more like a weak grimace, but she didn't seem disappointed. We went into a conference room, with a long gleaming synathwood table and matching chairs and very soft carpet and no windows. Dr Mensah sat down heavily with a sound of relief and made a big _houf!_ sigh, looking at me. I didn't need to sit down or relax or let out my breath, so I looked at the floor. She smiled again and said "Oh, I forgot, I have some pictures for you."

She touched the synathwood surface in front of her and a holo display screen hung in the air. There were Pin-Lee and Ratthi and Arada and Volescu and Bharadwaj and Overse and even Gurathin, back on Preservation, doing what they normally did when they weren't being attacked and defended by murderbots. There were pictures of them and their partners and children and sisters and brothers and parents, all of them safe and smiling for the holo. I could look at them as long as I wanted, and none of them could look back at me. On Dr Mensah's farm there were animals I knew from the entertainment feeds: lambs, cows, dogs, cats. Rows of trees and fields of flowers. I guess you could have put me in the middle of all that, but it would have been unsettling, like a bomb sitting on a table. 

"You can visit whenever you want to," Dr Mensah said, and I felt panicky.

"Thank you," I lied.

"Whenever _you_ want to," she said gently, and I mentally gave up. We sat in silence for a while, me still going through the holos, but it wasn't uncomfortable. Dr Mensah said if I wanted any of the pictures, they were mine to download, and I didn't tell her I'd already done that as soon as they'd popped up. 

"You wouldn't have to live with us," she tried again, for some reason. "With anyone. You could be by yourself. You'd be a citizen."

I managed to look her in the eye for three seconds, and she looked away first, smiling a little. "All right. I had to promise Arada I would try." I smiled too and it felt less like a grimace. We both knew if she had asked me to go, had said she wanted it, I would have, but she hadn't. She got up and touched the wall and a recessed cabinet slid out, and she took out a little portable heating unit and teabags and a beaker and cup and saucer that all matched. From the way she handled them I guessed they were hers. When she'd heated some water she made her tea, and didn't offer me any, which was nice. I was tired of turning things down and trying to sound chipper about it. She hesitated and said, "There was one other thing."

She had indeed gotten my message, and liked it very much, and she was going to testify in front of other government representatives, including some from the company, and wanted to know if she could use part of it? "As a kind of testimony," she said. This didn't make sense because the message was for her and wasn't mine anymore, but I said all right, it was fine. I knew that wasn't what she had really wanted to ask, because she hadn't relaxed, and she asked if it would be all right to use some of my security footage from the times we had been attacked, for the same reason. I wasn't thrilled about that, since it would be legal proof I'd hacked my module and the company would have the right to wipe me, but they already wanted to wipe me anyway, so it wasn't a new threat. I could tell she still was working up to whatever it was, since her fingers were tapping very lightly on the synthawood. Dr Mensah fidgeted less than any human I'd ever met. I started getting tense. 

"I wanted to....apologize," Dr Mensah said, sounding embarrassed. She didn't say why, so I had no idea for what.

"For what?" I said blankly, sounding human-clueless again.

"When we got back to Port FreeCommerce," she said, "and I permanently bought your contract from the company. I didn't think what that meant, to _you._ I know what it meant to me....what I wanted it to mean. That you were free, not just a free agent. That I wasn't your owner. But that's not what it meant to you, was it?"

There was no point in denying it since she had figured it out already. "No," I said. I tried to say it nicely, which just came out fake.

"I knew what I wanted it to mean," she said again, and looked so unhappy. "I didn't want to....I never wanted to own you."

"I know," I said. I could have said that she didn't, but both of us knew that wasn't true. I felt like saying it anyway. 

Dr Mensah sighed again, and really relaxed, which meant she was done. "Well, are you ready to become a citizen of Preservation Alliance?" she said in a happier tone, and we left the conference room and the holos and her tea setup and went through a couple of corridors into another room on the same level. It was an office, but a big one, with lots of empty space and big windows, which is how humans signal status. There was a little island of a fancy desk in the middle of the room with some furled flags standing behind it, and a short man with very shiny silver hair came out from behind it to greet us. He tried to shake my hand, so I stared at his shirt, which had ugly zigzag patterns on it, and removed my hand from his. He didn't seem to mind, though. Dr Mensah had the same files on her handheld as she'd sent me, and the man called them up on his desk's holo display, and then they had to put together a virtual collection of all my paperwork, including my original bill of sale to Dr Mensah and the company's official transfer of ownership after Pin-Lee's court order, which took time, paperwork always does. Then to my surprise there was actual paper -- well, synthapaper of course. Dr Mensah and the silver-haired man, who was called Representative Li, said it was the legal declaration of my citizenship and would be sent back to Preservation Alliance and stored there in an archive. That seemed like a waste of fuel and storage space to me, but whatever made them happy. The synthapaper felt very smooth and cold. We all had to sign it, and before that Representative Li called in his assistant, named Parvati, as a witness. Trying to actually pay attention to all the human names felt strange, almost embarrassing, although it wasn't like I could forget one of them once I cared about noticing. 

Representative Li read the declaration to me (thankfully it was pretty short) and asked me if I understood what it said, and I said I did, and then he took out a pen -- not a stylus, an ink pen -- and offered it to me. I just stared at him. "Now, you sign it," he said, without sounding as if I should have known that already. I had never signed anything in my life, and I also didn't have a name to sign. I had the company serial number and Murderbot, and that was it. The serial number was stamped on most inorganic bits of me and branded on internal organic bits, and also stamped on the declaration, but that designated me as former company property. I didn't know if it would still designate me, it wasn't the same thing as a human name. I didn't know what to do.

"You can make a mark to show you understand," Dr Mensah said quietly, "that's fine. Just an X will work." So I made a big ugly X on the synthapaper, to show I understood what was going on, and Dr Mensa and Representative Li signed and Parvati signed to show she'd watched us all sign it and none of us had been intoxicated or crazy. Parvati asked me how it felt to make history, and I said fine, and Representative Li said history was made every day, in a false cranky tone, but they all looked pleased. The company serial number was also on all the paperwork like the diplomatic ticket and the travel chit, but at least I didn't have to sign those. Representative Li asked if there was anything I wanted to call myself and like I had thought, Dr Mensah didn't like "Murderbot" as a name, so I shrugged.

Then Representative Li said, "It's a shame you're not going with her to the court hearing, she needs a bodyguard whatever she says, and you'd be perfect." My systems all went into the red for a second and I said, "Why does she need one?" He stepped back a little from me and said "Didn't they tell you about the death threats?"

Nobody had, of course -- maybe they thought I'd get upset and cry, or try to punch holes in the walls, but that's not what murderbots do. Once I had gotten the details from him, I said to Dr Mensah, "I could do it. I _am_ a SecUnit. I could be your SecUnit."

Dr Mensah was very uncertain, which was very unlike her, and said, "But you -- I wouldn't want to, I -- "

"Look," I said. I was trying to be patient and calm but all the humans in the room were still very nervous. "This is what humans _designed me to do._ I am supposed to be an interactive aspect of a security system. I can protect you better than anyone else. That's what I did back on the survey."

Dr Mensah wasn't sure and kept saying, "But only if you _want_ to," and it turned out the easiest thing to do would be for me to be hired as a private bodyguard by the embassy's security division, which would allow me access to their systems and the records of death threats and itineraries of where Dr Mensah was going next on her quest to get muderbots registered as just constructs that could kill you but had a choice about it, rather than walking weapons of mass murder. Representative Li arranged it all while Dr Mensah was still trying to protest, and finally he said, "Why can't you see this is what it really wants to do? Obviously it doesn't want to go home and cultivate a garden, and it has a point, it's a waste if all it does is wander around space trying not to be detained."

Dr Mensah looked at me, and I did my best to look back before I had to stare at the floor. "Do _you_ want to do this?" she asked me. "Be security again?"

"Yes, I do. For you. It's what I _am._ But I want to do it for you."

Dr Mensah gave in and said "All right," and Representative Li and Parvati both smiled and looked excited and finished up that bit of paperwork. Then I thought of something.

"So can I have my armour?" I asked. The armour had actually been part of the deal when Dr Mensah had bought my contract, although the company wouldn't repair or replace it. Dr Mensah and the others hadn't disposed of it, they had kept it for me. It might not work quite as well, but if I needed replacements the embassy security could probably get them for me. Dr Mensah hesitated.

"It does need armour," Representative Li said, and Mensah nodded. "Just....maybe not the helmet?" she asked.

I shrugged. "The organic parts of my head are the nonreplaceable ones," I said, and she looked thoughtful.

"Well....no faceplate? At least not that awful opaque one?"

"All right," I agreed. "New faceplate."

**Author's Note:**

> I did not title this "The Bodyguard," despite being sorely tempted. You are all welcome.
> 
> The concept of the [ansible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible) was of course given to sf by the wonderful Ursula K. Le Guin. 
> 
> "cultivate a garden": _— ....mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. »_ "Let us cultivate our garden," ending of Voltaire's _Candide_ (1759).
> 
> I got a lot of background information and inspiration from an excerpt from the second Murderbot novella, _Artificial Condition._ [Read it here.](https://marthawells.tumblr.com/post/165475524547/now-that-the-cover-by-jaime-jones-has-been) CANNOT. WAIT.


End file.
